From Kaunas to Rouen

This week, Timotiejus Norvila, a Kaunas based street artist, was invited by Rouen and Rouen Seine Normande 2028. Present for a few days to do some scouting, he will soon be back with a mural project in collaboration with a French artist.

Kaunas is one of the cities with which we have decided to work on the long-run because the Europe of territories and culture is central in our proposal. Today, we favour the dialogue of European’s rivers and it is in this sense that Kaunas became a river-city friend.

Kaunas is also a partner of various projects from our bid such as Île Flottante, a great utopia aiming to offer the river Seine a new island, ephemeral, mobile and resilient, a utopia evoked a thousand times by the inhabitants of our territory during the creative workshops.

Kaunas is also present on our project (Re)sources which gather our beyond the wall artistic proposals, questioning our relation to the resources from our environment: Exploitation? Domination? Cohabitation? Poetic rituals mixing artistic disciplines that compose a pallet of reconnection to the living, and reinvent, by looking and listening, a new co-existence with the non-human, the plants and the animals.

This collaboration with Timotiejus Norvila unfolds as part of the France – Lithuania 2024 cultural season organized by the French Institute: Ar(Rivers). The coalition of rivers and European collaboration being two central points to our bid, we naturally welcomed Timotiejus to reaffirm this will.

This partnership also echoes the programme ‘Emerging Kaunas’ that aims to involve younger generations in the creation of a city that represent them. That is why Rouen Seine Normande 2028 developed ‘Youth Participation Now’, a programme of mobility which aims to write a plea on the participation of young Europeans to the European Capital of Culture.